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  ‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ I tell her, making my voice sleepy. The end of the quilt has a seizure; Grace is worming his way in.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I’m out in the Wicklow Hills, right, walking up a steep bit, I think it’s the heathery patch above Lough Dan, and there’s a few stragglers coming down, Germans with rucksacks and such.’

  ‘Nothing weird about that,’ yawns Cara.

  ‘Well but, just as I’ve turned sideways against a granite boulder to let the last walker go by, I glance up and it’s your sister.’

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘Have you another sister I don’t know about?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’ Cara reaches down for the cat and lifts his clenched orange limbs on to her knees. ‘Though I suppose they could have smuggled one or two away before I was born.’

  I lean up on one elbow and keep my voice airy. ‘In the dream her hair’s blowing across her eyes, and when she pulls it back the face is all dark, like those leathery bodies they found in the bog.’

  ‘Uuurgh.’ Cara sits up in bed and puts her crumpet down. Grace springs on to my thighs, clawing at the quilt.

  ‘No, in the dream it isn’t frightening,’ I tell her. ‘Or only a bit. Otherwise she’s normal. She’s got this black leather jacket and a cigarette in her hand.’

  ‘Kate doesn’t smoke.’

  ‘She might by now.’ I am concentrating on the cat, scratching the triangle of skull till his eyes narrow with pleasure.

  ‘Nah, she’s a control freak, she’d hate to need it.’

  ‘It’s just the dark brown face that’s so strange.’

  ‘You wouldn’t recognize her if you did meet her, you know.’ Cara tweaks the tip of Grace’s tail. ‘Big sis is probably in a twinset and pearls by now.’

  ‘I would so. I was in her class.’

  ‘That was decades ago.’ The crumpet pauses, halfway to her mouth. ‘Listen to me. I used to say that when I just meant a while. But now it’s true. I’ve been on this planet for practically three decades.’

  I laugh and take a bite out of her crumpet.

  Cara pulls it away, getting butter on my cheek; her face is thoughtful as she bends to lick it off. ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t recognize Kate now, even I mightn’t.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘Must have been that awful weekend we all spent in the cockroach motel in Cape Cod, in ’84. After that we stopped pretending we were a family.’

  ‘You must miss her, though,’ I say.

  ‘Really? Why must I?’ Cara sounds as haughty as her sister used to.

  ‘Well, you know, blood being thicker than water and all that.’

  ‘Bullshit’s thicker than either.’

  I recoil. ‘I was only saying…’

  ‘Everybody’s always been only saying,’ she snarls. ‘Pitying me for my “broken home”, assuming all my problems can be attributed to my being a motherless waif.’ Slowing down, she adds, ‘One guy at college asked could that be why I turned out, ahem, the way I did.’

  I groaned. ‘He didn’t! Freud lives.’

  Cara rests her nose in the dip of my collar-bone. ‘Didn’t mean to bite your head off, by the way.’

  ‘Craven apology accepted.’

  She puts her buttery tongue in my ear for a moment, as if taking a reading. ‘I do remember missing Kate for a while, actually.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Missed her a lot more. Kept waiting for her to come back. The visits just upset me. But at that age you change so much in a year. You get used to anything. You forget your life was ever different.’

  I nodded, not believing her.

  ‘In the long run I did fine with Dad. It was him I always used to run to if anything went wrong, anyway. He didn’t think I was feeble the way Mum did.’

  ‘Surely –’

  ‘And the year after they left I got you, didn’t I?’ she interrupted, leaning to rub her nose along my wider one. ‘Kate and Mum are more like distant relatives now.’

  ‘That’s a bit sad,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s pretty normal. How often do you see your brother, who lives in the same city?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I go back to stroking the cat, who is writhing in the valley of duvet between us. ‘Her face would still be the same, you know.’

  ‘Kate’s?’

  ‘I bet she still looks just like her photo.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The one of her on rollerskates, in the dungarees.’

  ‘I don’t know any photos of her on rollerskates,’ says Cara puzzledly.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘You mean those blue dungarees she never let me try on?’

  Almost too late, I remember which photo I mean. The one I stole, all those years ago, on my first visit to the big house. I was a sweaty teenager in a red uniform, irked to be stuck watching television with the little sister when what I wanted was a walk in the woods with the big one. ‘Must be confusing it with some other picture,’ I tell Cara, and swipe the end of her crumpet.

  My stomach was rumbling as I came back to the present, and to the top of the queue. A gleaming nun deposited the white circle on my tongue. It had taken me years to learn how to dissolve the sweet papery wafer off the ridges of my mouth. Processing down from communion now, head dipped in what my employer Sister Dominic still called the modesty of the eyes, I tried to realize that this was God, sliding down my throat. It was good practice, believing improbable things.

  Believing was easier than bowing to his will, anyway. Once I began questioning his motives, I got so angry I wanted to hawk him up again. Why did you do it, you bastard? You couldn’t have needed Cara more than I did. If times are all one in eternity, why couldn’t you have waited a while longer for her?

  Like me, Mr. Wall must have dreaded the after-mass jollity of neighbours who hadn’t heard the news yet. Better to have them come across it in tomorrow’s paper. So instead of sitting down for the final prayers we slipped out the heavy door into the dripping twilight. We got to my dark green Mini just as the rain turned heavier. While we fastened our seat-belts in unison it spattered on the windscreen. ‘Kate’s due in tomorrow morning,’ I told him.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Was he losing his mind on me now? ‘Kate,’ I told him warily. ‘And Mrs Wall.’

  ‘Oh, forgive me, I still think of her as Cáit, must get out of the habit. Is her mother still calling herself that, Mrs Wall? Sounds a bit old hat.’

  ‘I believe so. It goes well with Winona.’

  ‘Yes, Win always had a weakness for alliteration.’ He blew his nose into a large cotton handkerchief.

  ‘So I’ll pick them up at the airport, will I?’

  ‘Would you mind, dear, that would be wonderful.’

  As I drove through the deserted suburb Mr. Wall looked out the window, head bobbing like a child on a trip. He glanced over once to say, ‘About Wednesday.’

  ‘I have that all in hand, don’t worry your head. I left the ad on the newspaper’s answerphone, and the Monsignor’s booked.’

  ‘You’re very good.’

  ‘And as far as I know all the friends are in the address book so I’ll do some ringing round tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Won’t they see it in the paper?’

  ‘They’re not all Irish Times readers,’ I explained, sliding the car on to the kerb outside the big house.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mr. Wall guiltily.

  The honeysuckle hung around the front door, gemmed with rain. I held my breath so as not to smell it. The breeze caught the wind chime made of forks that Cara sent back from her Californian trip a couple of years ago. Such a honeyed tinkle they made; I stilled them with my hand.

  We stood in the kitchen with nothing to do. The cat-flap crashed; Grace was off on his evening rambles. I had put my handbag on the sideboard and now my arms hung down, fingers tingling. The kitchen was full of that fuzzy grey light which builds up wh
en a house is left empty round teatime. I was afraid to move and disturb a cloud of it.

  ‘Have you eaten, Pen?’ asked Mr. Wall. ‘I suppose one ought to.’

  I bent to click on the electric fire; its bottom coil bloomed from rust to orange. ‘I had some cheese before mass, but you know me. I could fancy one of your soufflé omelettes.’

  ‘Yes, you’re partial to them.’ I could hear his face brighten. ‘Very good, give me ten minutes.’ And he set off like a dog loosed from its chain, snapping on the light and rummaging in the larder.

  I checked Grace’s water. I heard the sound of an egg smashing on the parquet, but pretended not to notice as Mr. Wall mopped it up. I leaned my bulk against the mahogany sideboard, soothed by the sound of fork whipping egg-white. My eyes began to shut.

  ‘I wonder, dear, could you do me a favour and run me in later on?’

  ‘Run you in?’

  ‘Pay my respects.’

  My head was still fogged up. ‘Oh of course. I just, yeah, sure, whenever.’

  I cleared my throat in a roar and strode off. Though the living-room was dark, the sky was still blue gauze in the windows. The first thing I did was to draw the velvet curtains and shut it out. Then I snapped on the reading light by the fireplace. There was a torn envelope sticking out of the shelf between Encyclopaedia of World Knowledge and Asterix the Gaul. ‘Cara’, it said in an unfamiliar scrawl. A birthday card from last June? It was empty. I found a dusty biro on the hearth and began to make a list on the back of the envelope.

  ‘To Do’, it began confidently. ‘Notify Registrar of Births and Deaths’; the nurse on the phone had assured me it was urgent. I wondered had I spelled the word Registrar right; I kept visualizing him as God’s recording angel. ‘Funeral home will arrange chapel of rest and do med. certs’, I scribbled to reassure myself. ‘Ring relatives’, that was unless Mr. Wall showed any signs of initiative. And while I was at the phone, ‘Ring friends’. Cara’s Snoopy address book was down the back of the leather armchair, I remembered spotting it the other day. I walked over now and dug in for it; my back ached. I riffled its three-by-three pages; whose were all these first names, I wondered, all these Sues and Mels and Jays, and how many of them had she slept with? Moving on, moving on, best not to get bogged down in details. ‘Send back ID cards and passport’, I added to my list; I had read in some novel that you had to do that.

  It exhausted me even to think of doing all these things. I folded up the envelope and put it in the pocket of my trousers. To kill time, I read the spines of all the books in the fireside case, left to right, top shelf to bottom. Nineteenth-century titles were the most comforting. When I had watched the last five minutes of Biddy and Miley’s thoughts on the weather in Glenroe, Mr. Wall carried in the airy omelette on a tray, and we switched over to a documentary on otters.

  I was calm, I was doing fine. He passed me the unopened Bourbon Creams. It was only at the bottom of my second cup of tea that I realized I had eaten halfway down the packet without a pause. I tucked the cellophane over the top and put it back on the tray.

  Mr. Wall had left his biscuit on the saucer. ‘Perhaps a quick round?’ At a time like this, the man wanted to play Scrabble.

  He cleared his throat. I could see his lips tightening over his teeth.

  ‘Good idea,’ I told him.

  The odd thing was, he played better than ever. He seemed gripped by the need not to think, not to daydream, not to let a word slip by. He put ‘seize’ on a double word square and countered my ‘zebra’ with a nest of the kind of two-letter words that are used only in Scrabble. I watched his face light up with achievement.

  At eight exactly Mr. Wall stared at the hands of his watch. ‘Perhaps we should be thinking about making a move.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ I said, too hearty.

  I stood on the doorstep, waiting for him to get his raincoat. I would drive him there, I decided, but I would not make myself go in. Not that I was particularly squeamish, or would have been repelled by a battered face; Cara’s face had often looked battered from the inside. I just felt no need to see it, the thing they would call the remains. I knew it was more true to say that she was still wandering round the Aegean, buying postcards but no stamps. Not getting around to coming home, but not to be thought of as any less real than she ever was.

  Mr. Wall was double-locking the front door. The honeysuckle dangled near my face, but I breathed through my mouth.

  Minnie’s ignition moaned into life as soon as I turned the key; no excuse there. The damp streets were deserted, the last courting couple having dawdled home with a steaming bag of chips between them. I always got this fantasy, driving through Dublin on a Sunday evening, that they had dropped that bomb which leaves buildings untouched but turns people to dust. I alone, through some whim of fate, had survived, full-fleshed, and was crossing town in a dirty green Mini. Where would I be heading, if I was literally alone in the world? I could raid the gourmet delicatessen, I supposed; shame to let it all spoil. Or perhaps a library, to hide under a table in the children’s section. The bomb couldn’t kill Cinderella.

  ‘Next left we turn at, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, glad of his tactful reminder. Then I admitted, ‘I was heading on in to Immac, on auto-pilot.’

  ‘I never quite understood,’ replied Mr. Wall, ‘why you girls called it that.’

  ‘What, Immac?’

  ‘Of course I can understand that abbreviations are irreverent and therefore amusing, but why the change in stress? I would have expected not Immac but Immac, for Immaculate Conception Convent.’

  ‘Oh, but did nobody tell you in all these years?’ I stared at him. ‘Immac’s a brand-name for, what’s the word, a depilatory cream. You must have heard of it.’

  ‘My wife preferred an electric razor.’ Then, embarrassed by this confidence, he murmured, ‘At least, as long as I knew her. I believe the police often set up a speed trap at this corner, perhaps…’

  I went down to forty.

  After a minute Mr. Wall began again. ‘Immac, I get it now. The link must be the taming of adolescent females.’

  ‘I don’t remember the original reason, it just seemed funny at the time. When I was a pupil I thought they were trying to tame us, but since I’ve been teaching there, I realize what an impossible task that would be.’

  For the rest of the journey through the increasingly seedy streets of the old city we talked about our jobs: my zealous nuns, his vague cataloguing assistants, my pre-pubertal brats, his precious books.

  Sitting at the traffic lights, I watched the other drivers. They looked sober and careful but you never could tell. We were all potential killers nowadays.

  I had never been to that hospital before, and never to a morgue. Or no, mortuary, that was the polite word. When my father died I was eighteen. I spent the day before the funeral cleaning the house so as not to disgrace us in front of the neighbours. My mother was hit much harder than I was. He had been a nice man, but not a very memorable one. I felt very low, of course, but not so low that I wanted to go to the mortuary and kiss his glassy forehead.

  And since my father there had been no occasion. Remarkable, really, that death hadn’t laid a bony finger on me or mine for more than a decade. If it had, I would be practised in such matters, would know what to think when, would have some experience of the opening and shutting of the gates. As it was, I felt such an amateur. About to embark on the biggest loss I could imagine, with no practice at mourning a mother or even a pop star, and never having so much as stepped inside a hospital mortuary.

  I wheeled in the gate and parked near the entrance for a speedy getaway. I mouthed a quickie: ‘Eternal rest grant unto them and may perpetual light shine upon them.’ The vision conjured up was of a neon-lit meat safe.

  ‘You go on in,’ I told Mr. Wall as he picked at his seat-belt.

  His face was grey, with a bar of orange streetlight across it. ‘Ah. You’re not –’

  ‘I’ll stay in t
he car.’

  ‘Right so.’

  It didn’t seem to have rained in this part of town. I watched him straighten his tie as he walked across to the light spilling from the main door, an unaccustomed slowness to his pace. I wondered was he getting a touch of arthritis, then realized that he was trying to be reverent.

  The radio kept me going for five minutes of a play about Queen Medhb and Cúchulainn, but then I snapped it off and the silence closed in. Not that a car was ever entirely silent, especially not an old banger like this. As the engine cooled a series of gentle clicks filled the air. ‘Hey, Minnie Mouse,’ I whispered, ‘what say you ’n’ me go take a ride in the hills, see ourselves some stars and cut ourselves some turf for a bonfire by the light of the silvery moooooon.’ But no, we were waiting for the good gentleman in whose house (and garage, respectively) we lived rent-free, owing to our illicit amorous connection with the aforementioned’s younger daughter, the late Cara Máire Fionnuala Wall.

  At that the silly voices slid away and my face shut down. The cheeks sank heavy as leather; the bones around the eyes fused into a helmet of pain. It was the word ‘late’ that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn’t happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere and phoned ahead to say ‘Might be late, don’t wait up, pet’.

  My fingers were locked around the steering-wheel. I made them tap out ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, which by some perverse association was the first tune that came into my head. After the second verse I had myself in hand again. I could let the fresh memory through the valve, inch by inch.

  It was just gone midnight last night; I remembered it because I had been glancing at the kitchen clock, just beginning to let myself worry that Cara’s plane had been delayed in Athens. It was a short call but a good one. Between echoing yawns she said that her tote hadn’t turned up on the conveyor belt yet, so she had told the others from the Attic to go ahead on the last bus to town. She said she’d come home in a taxi as soon as the bag emerged from whatever cavern they hid them in. Little bourgeoise, I called her, joking about the taxi fare. I hoped she knew I was joking, all the times I was. Actually I was glad to think of her laying her head back in the comfort of a taxi and speeding through the night to our hot pillows. When I had put down the phone I climbed upstairs, pulled the duvet over my head and slept like a trusting spaniel. In my dream a bare-breasted Amazon sat on a motorbike under my window, playing the bagpipes.